Started a new gig yesterday. Been a code cutter for many years now - since 1987 and as it happens in our careers every now and then, we take on a change in our careers as opportunity knocks etc.
After having been in the telecommunications industry for the last 9 years, that pivotal moment has arrived for myself and I’ve taken on a new gig in relatively a high end firm which specialises in hedge funds and futures trading.
They write their own software systems which read various real time data feeds and based on user defined parameters, the software systems issue buy and sell transactions to vaious brokers.
The current development software team centers on an “assembly” written decision kernel wrapped in a Delphi software envelope which then does both the input and output communications etc.
Intellectually, nothing intimidates me regarding what’s taking place, but Delphi isn’t something I’ve worked with - although Object Oriented stuff is something I’ve worked with extensively these past 5 years under the Microsoft “Visual” range of development products.
Anyone here got advice regarding Delphi? Overviews? Insights? Opinions? Drawbacks? All posts welcome.
I’ve used it quite a bit. It’s nice for building GUI’s, but Object Pascal lacks a few features (or it did last I used it (Delphi 6)) which start to annoy after a while (no static methods etc). Object Pascal is also very verbose and more rigidly structured compared to the likes of C++.
Object Pascal doesn’t have all of the overrides and such that the various C’s do, but it’s one of the most beautiful, legible languages the exist. Anytime I do Perl or C it comes out looking a whole lot like Pascal (Objective-C is about the only thing that looks unique when I write it.).
It’s nothing to be scared of, that’s certain. Anytime I need to do Windows it’s my environment of choice.
Tips? Like any language or dev environment, get in there and play with it! I could also highly recommend “Mastering Delphi 4” although, uh, we’re up to Studio 2006 now. In any case, for important things like that, I like to work through a whole-book tutorial, so maybe that’ll work for you.
I was very excited about it when it came out, but found object pascal frustrating, because it was both like and unlike C++. When they came out with Borland Builder C++ I was thrilled and have used it (warts and all) everywhere I have went. Due to the fact that Borland has announced that they are going to sell of their IDE devision, I’ve recently decided though that I will embrace C# instead.
But back to Delphi. One of the cools things is it compiles blazingly fast.
Go out to Torry’s web http://www.torry.net/news.php?id=26 to find good shareware controls. Also go to sourceforge and get a copy of the Jedi controls - some great freeware controls that I have found to be pretty stable.
I think it is a great tool - especially if you know pascal better than I do.